Editor's notebook | Bowie Blade-News (HometownBowie.com)

Jack Johnson wants to push through a bigger fee on telephone service. In other words, a new tax.

More than 10 years ago the voters of this county approved a referendum question which gave voters the right to reject county tax hikes in the voting booth. For more than three decades, a voter-imposed cap on property taxes has been in force here.Johnson feels he can raise the phone tax without a referendum because it was passed by the General Assembly in 2002 to raise money for schools. Others disagree. In the county budget for next year, Johnson has proposed a 3 percentage point increase in the phone tax. Johnson said the money is needed to fully fund the school system's budget.

Perhaps the schools do need more money, but Johnson's plea for that tax revenue might be a tad more credible if, say, the County Council gave up its costly fleet of cars, Johnson stopped using a small army of county cops to transport him hither and yon, the County Council stopped mailing out very expensive slick "newsletters" that serve no other purpose than to put their faces in front of Prince Georgians at taxpayers' expense in hopes of some votes, and, if county cash is such a problem, surely the County Council and Johnson should stop handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in dubious "grants" to a wide variety of churches and organizations, some of which claim they never even received the money allegedly handed over to them. Where'd it go?

And if financial woes in the county are so threatening that we have to face a hike in the cost of using our phones, why in heaven's name do County Council members get to sign up with the county retirement fund? In our view, they shouldn't. Why should this be a one-way sacrifice on the part of already overburdened county taxpayers? Before having the gall to try and squeeze more money out of Prince George's residents, the county's elected officials should try a little cost cutting themselves.

Judy Robinson, a county activist involved in the original successful tax cap effort in 1996, told the Washington Post this week, "I believe absolutely that this is a trust issue, the trust people have that government will follow the law and not do sneaky little things to try to get around it." We couldn't agree more.